Possible Pragmatic Political Economy in the 3rd Millennium

As wealth concentrates and the gap between America’s rich and middle class/poor continues to increase developing nations may associate that process with democracy and choose better functioning, more egalitarian nations to emulate. Nations like China and Saudi Arabia without democracy seem to be efficient economically and on the rise.

Popular economic pragmatism in the years ahead may devalue political theory for economic structures and choose to regulate economies through pragmatic intervention that would keep the margin between the richest and the poor within an acceptable range of perhaps two orders of magnitude. Free enterprise rather than state socialism or corporatism would be encouraged. Taxation would be on an as needed basis to keep the government solvent and the financial spatial separation from rich and poor from increasing to unacceptable distances creating oppressive and politically corrupting anisotropy.

The new era of pragmatic political economy would be simultaneously populous and efficient in defending individual liberty, political egalitarianism, ecospheric conservation and recovery and a way of life lifting all the vessels in the harbor when the tide comes in. Some may believe that a society without government is an oxymoron, or a crime in progress cluster, that human beings can have a tax free and ungoverned society only if they are few in number and God's natural larder seemingly boundless proving natural resources.

The new economic pragmatism will experience numerous ideological political challenges in the world ahead if it develops that way as I would guess it will. Individuals require sufficient liberty to invent new productive potential, and society requires enough regulation to prevent political oppression, ecospheric decay and economic regions of dysfunction.

Objective economic analysis is better suited for quantification than political-economic. Like pro sports teams a quarterback or center no matter how good cannot play the game and win alone or while his teammates are wearing rags, starving or benched and observing from the sidelines. The good economic team may pay some of its star players better yet all the team must have pay of a reasonable and dignified scale without degradation compelling them to boo their own teammates with the golden compensation.